Readers of a certain age will for the rest of their lives be haunted by a specific string of bleeps, boops, fuzzes, and machine noises. It’s a far cry from the buttery smooth connections we have grown used to today – but indeed our our first interfacing with the World Wide Web was through a dial-up connection that boasted blistering speeds of 56.6 kilobits per second if you used a specific modem.
Eventually, thanks to a rather special chip – known as the Amati Communications Overture ADSL Chip Set – we transcended. Gone was the age of torrid speeds and images that took an age to load up, and we ushered in a new age in which maximum speeds were almost 2,000 times faster to up to 100 megabits per second. This paved the way for a new kind of internet full of multimedia.
Digital Subscriber Line/Loop (DSL) was the technology that gave us access to the web by taking advantage of existing phone lines to transmit data through a modem – and many companies were working on competing standards for DSL. For the standard that emerged, we owe everything to Amati Communications – a startup that emerged from Stanford.
The chip that started the web boom
Amati Communications was one of many that were working to develop a new approach to accessing the internet when they devised the DSL modulation approach known as discrete multitone (DMT). This is a way of making a phone line resemble hundreds of subchannels and improving transmission by robbing bits from the poorest channels and donating them to the wealthiest channels, according to IEEE Spectrum. It eventually became a global standard for DSL and the chipset became universally adopted many years later.
The company continued to promote its iconic chipset throughout the 90s, selling in very modest amounts at the start — but enjoying a fast rise as the decade drew to a close and we neared the dot-com bubble.
Then, in 1997, Texas Instruments acquired the firm for $395 million – which was the company’s first deal in the hardware segment. The semiconductor manufacturer, based in Texas, was keen to deliver broadband multimedia services – including high-speed internet access and real-time video – over phone lines using the DSL technology that Amati had pioneered.
By the 2000s, the chipset was shipping in the millions, and zippier broadband access was gradually making its way throughout homes and offices around the developed world. While we may be relishing in its demise now – with the rise of full-fibre broadband – it’s worth appreciating just how significant that initial jump away from the dreaded dial-up tone was, and the possibilities it opened up across society.